Eavesdropping: The Psychotherapist in Film and Television

Description

In Eavesdropping, a selection of contributions from internationally-based film consultants, practicing psychotherapists and interdisciplinary scholars investigate the curious dynamics that occur when films and television programmes attempt to portray the psychotherapist, and the complexities of psychotherapy, for popular audiences. The book evaluates the potential mismatch between the onscreen psychotherapist, whose raison d’être is to entertain and engage global audiences, and the professional, real-life counterpart, who becomes intimately involved with the dramas of their patients. While several contributors conclude that actual psychotherapy, and the way psychotherapists and their clients grapple with notions of fantasy and reality, would make a rather poor show, Eavesdropping demonstrates the importance of psychotherapy and psychotherapists on-screen in assisting us to wrestle with the discomfort – and humour - of our lives. Offering a unique insight into perceptions of psychotherapy, Eavesdropping will be essential and insightful reading for analytical psychologists, psychoanalysts, academics and students of depth psychology, film and television studies, media studies and literature, as well as filmmakers. Contents List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction • Lucy Huskinson and Terrie Waddell Part I: Erotic transference 1 The (mis)representation of psychoanalysis in film • Andrea Sabbadini 2 Challenging Freud on the realities of erotic transference with fictional case study: The Sopranos (1999–2007) and In Treatment (2008–2010) • Lucy Huskinson 3 The real psychotherapist: an impossibility for film • Elisabeth Hanscombe Part II: The psychoanalytic approach 4 Equus: ecstasy, therapy, and the animal • Barbara Creed 5 ‘A conversation between enlightened friends’: the mutual reassurances of the arts and sciences in Freud (1984) • Mark Nicholls 6 Applying psychoanalysis to Hindi cinema • Dinesh Bhugra and Gurvinder Kalra 7 The bad psychoanalyst: watching the success of failure • Patricia Gherovici and Jamieson Webster Part III: A contest of wills 8 Shrink-wrapped television: simulated therapy, disclosure,and the lure of ‘plausible doubt’ • Terrie Waddell 9 Crossing the River Styx in a small boat • Helena Bassil-Morozow 10 Remarks on the functions of the psychiatrist in Hitchcock’s Psycho and Bergman’s Persona • Donald Fredericksen 11 Romance or psychotherapy? • Irene Oestrich Screen references Index